I I love a Parade. I went to one on Saturday and I really wanted to tell
you about it. I’m not really in the mood anymore.

I wanted to share with you the delight I always find in the joyful exuberance with which the LGBT community of Boston displays their pride and celebrates the growth of the community as a whole. They march, dance, strut and float through the city streets, as they have on the second Saturday in June every year for the past 46, in a parade that is no longer simply an act of “in your face, ‘we’re here, we’re queer’ defiance”, but a festival of inclusion that features not only drag queens and leather boys, but local, state and national politicians, sports groups, unions and faculty, staff & students from area high schools and colleges. I am so lucky that I live in a place where diversity is celebrated and embraced.

Today, however, I’m just glad they got the chance to do that before…well, before.

By now, everyone knows about what happened in Orlando in the early hours of Sunday, June 13. I can’t even call it a tragedy. Tragedy has become a weak word used far too often, to describe scenarios like this. That “it” happened next door to the “Happiest Place on Earth”, to a group of people who only want to live and let live, love and let love, is an abomination.

I won’t continue to fill your Monday with my outrage. This isn’t the forum and frankly, I don’t have the words. I was okay yesterday, but today I’m trying very hard to care about the goings on around me and to be “present”.

I’ll leave you with this, the words of an artist whose whole world depends on the energy, creativity and artistry of members of the LGBT community: